No Rest for the Wicked

I began quickly addressing the obvious rust the car had. It featured a nice design of rock dents on both sides, had some rot in the inner AND outer fenders in the rear, had rust on both the rear hatch edge as well as the rear valence, but…the car ran great aside from small leaks.

It was on this car that I spent most of my time learning how to sand, bondo, and re-shape metal in hopes of paint one day. I had it sitting in this limbo stage for awhile till I eventually managed to save up for paint. I fixed as much as I could with spot welds/grinding/bondo but the most problematic areas were the inner and outer skins in the rear wheel wells, which I chose not to just go crazy with bondo.

So, I began to source full replacement panels for the rear arches and brand new fenders in the front. I didn’t feel confident in welding huge pieces on the car without risk of future rust so, I cut out all the rot for the body shop so they could just weld the new panels in and go from there.

I was originally going to paint the car a sort of teal color, but decided to keep it original and go with the LE6U paint code from factory since changing the exterior color that drastically without doing the inside would look really bad. To further concrete my decision, I photo shopped the 1984 Enkei Classics on my car with the original paint code and fell in love with how well it contrasts. Almost military schemed, the colors seemed to pop well without being obnoxiously “loud” in color. I let the car sit till it was time to bring her out and get it painted.